One of the dangers of working at a place like Cato is living with a constant target on your back. Any time you do something that can possibly be construed the wrong way, chances are it will be -- and often very publicly. This just happened to a colleague last night after he tweeted something with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

Michael Cannon, a health policy expert for Cato, the libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries, took to Twitter today to trade jokes about the oil spill. Responding to a tragic story about a New Orleans area sheriff asking federal authorities to investigate reports that undocumented workers are involved in the oil spill clean up, Cannon tweeted that undocumented workers “are very absorbent.”...While Cannon might have gotten a good laugh out of his comment, pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric leads to dehumanization and sometimes violence.

Never mind that Charles Koch is no longer associated with Cato. Never mind that Cannon has previously tweeted about the unfair and racist anti-immigrant law in Arizona. And never mind that the person he was responding to is herself a child of an immigrant and is a grandchild of Japanese internment camp victims--camps, of course, established by heroic lefty icon Franklin Roosevelt. No, we at Cato are racist shills for big oil because we believe in private property and free markets. We are fully incapable of holding views in line with the Left and joking at the expense of irrational sheriffs who make headlines with their idiocy. We are evil people whom deserve no benefit of the doubt--or even simple fact-checking our policy stances.(PDF)

About Me

Jonathan Blanks is a writer and researcher in Washington, DC. He graduated from Indiana University with a B.A. in Political Science, where he concentrated on American politics, Russian foreign policy, African-American studies, and classical history. His professional career, however, has focused primarily on criminal justice. His writings on that subject have been published in the Washington Post, The New Republic, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune , Capital Playbook (New York), Reason, Libertarianism.org, Rare.us, and Indianapolis Star, among others. His appearance at a toddler's birthday was once noted in Mike Allen's Playbook. None of the opinions written herein reflect these publications or any institutions with which he may be affiliated. You can follow him on Twitter @BlanksSlate